Does anyone else think that Lucrezia Mongfish has, perhaps, become a parody of herself?
People who knew her 20 years ago-- Klaus, the Jaegermonsters, Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, the newly ascendant Rat Queen, etc-- say she was always like this. They testify that they're not surprised she turned out to be the one who devestated Europa with aerial bombardments and horrific Mind-Control Wasps.
And yet.
I can't help but think, she wasn't always like this.
Once upon a time, she was one woman, with one physical body. She was a brilliantly powerful spark, and she wasn't afraid to lie, steal, copy notes, and cheat to get ahead, on top of that.
She had at least 3 powerful men wrapped around her finger-- Agatha got some of that Rizz from her Mom's side, but Lucrezia was actively trying to seduce and manipulate the boys, and play them against each other.
Let's say the Heterodyne Boys were actively doing heroics for about 25ish years, before it all went wrong. Bill would've been in his 40s when he finally got married.
Lucrezia Mongfish would've been in her 40s when she got married. She's still beautiful, still desired, still healthy-- but time marches on, relentlessly.
Pouting at her Daddy to come help his favorite daughter... It just isn't cute anymore.
Castle Heterodyne was no doubt glad that Bill finally brought a wife home, but I'm sure that it ALSO encouraged him & Barry to open the Seraglio for some younger models, if she didn't produce a healthy Heterodyne Heir or five fast enough.
.
Lucrezia Mongfish wanted Eternal Youth. She wanted to be "Forever 21." She wanted that Second Breakthrough, that ascendance that was promised to her when the Geisterdamen called her Goddess.
But she's in her 40's, and she's shipped off Klaus so he won't cause trouble, and Aaronev's hair is thinning and he's looking at a political marriage, and she has the Heterodyne, but Mechanicsburg does not LOVE HER.
She is a Spark, and she is brilliant and ambitious and determined, and she has been studying mind-manilulation and transferance for years. She finds a Muse, in the catacombs of the ancient Heterodynes, and she successfully transfers a mind from machine to flesh, with the personality intact.
I'm sure there were many test-subjects, and many experiments, before she was ready to try it on herself.
I think something went wrong.
.
Lucrezia Mongfish was once a woman with a singular body, with a heartbeat and breath, and appetites for cake, for sex, for power, for love, for adoration, for music, for jewels... She wanted it all.
But she still had to sleep, and hydrate. Take bathroom breaks. Experience boredom, and itches, the relief of removing restrictive garments, the minor pleasures and frustrations of being alive.
Then she made herself into a bodiless ghost, distilled "essence" that could-- in theory-- jump from host to host, or take on MANY bodies., so that she would never have to age, and never have to die.
Something went wrong, of course.
There are fewer compatible hosts than you'd think, out there. Her brilliant machines are delicate, finicky, and the processes were executed imperfectly by her devoted followers.
She wanted to turn back the hands of time. She found herself adrift, trapped outside of it, for untold ages. Stuck in a box, going insane, with nobody to rescue her from her own bad decisions.
She wanted a brand-new body-- but this one is inelegant, that one can't hold a Spark, this one is missing some parts-- like skin, or taste buds, or a foot-- and that one isn't PRETTY ENOUGH!
She's throwing a tantrum. She is the ghost of A Woman With Appetites, but she no longer exists in a body that can crave cake, or sex, or water, or sleep. She has the distorted memory of an emptiness inside, and she must force everyone to love her, to adore her, to OBEY HER EVERY WHIM so that she can feel right again.
She used to hunt cats for fun, on her family estate. Her father taught her to respond to pain by spreading it around. She was spoiled, and played both Wicked Schemer and Damsel In Distress, for longer than she should've gotten away with it.
Was she like Zola? Was she like Sephie?
Who was Lucrezia Mongfish, when she was a young woman with a father, and sisters, and a mother who is never mentioned, friends and frenemies and rivals from University, and dozens of handsome young suitors to choose from?
Who was Lucrezia, when she was no longer quite as young, when she was married, when she was pregnant with her second child, and ready to take the plunge towards Immortality?!
Would she recognize the person, the ghost, the demonic legion, that she has become?
Okay, it's gotten somewhat more complicated/elaborate than that, but that was my initial thought.
My computer is still out and about on its personal villain arc (sent away to see if it can get repaired), so I'm not up to typing my entire spiel up right now (on my phone without even the help of text suggestions), but I WILL answer any questions I can because I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about this.
PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT THIS I HAVE SO MUCH LORE IN MY BRAIN NOW!!!!!
Only YOU (PEOPLE) can make this idea more approachable by helping me break the mess into more manageable chunks that I could address individually!
Headcanon on reasonable evidence, actually: Every Heterodyne gets their own specific pack of Jägermonster guards.
Yes, the Jägermonsters are all sworn to the family in general, but Heterodynes do unreasonable and dangerous things on absolutely no notice, and it's helpful to have a specific set of personal guards who know them as individuals well enough to respond immediately. (Of course, Jägers think this sounds like fun.)
Agatha having Dimo, Maxim, and Oggie on more or less permanent assignment to her isn't unusual; it's normal. They know this, and have encouraged her to fall into a pattern they were expecting, actually, and she didn't take any steering at all. On some instinctive level she was expecting it too. Even if Dimo keeps his promotion to General, he'll be a General on the move, from wherever Agatha happens to be. They'll be with her for the rest of her life.
Consorts get their own squads, too. At some point in the future, Gil and Tarvek both acquire a handful of their own personal Jägers, sottle-like. (They notice it happen anyway.)
Jorgi is absolutely one of Tarvek's squad, because there's no way he wasn't designed to be Tarvek's personal guard Jäger, and it will be hilarious.
I'd also love to see Agatha assign Jenka to him, because Tarvek's recently on record as missing his personal spy network, and he and Jenka would have that up and running in no time flat. They'd have fun. (Jenka doesn't hold "being Andronicus Valois' descendent" against him, because Tarvek's loyalties are firmly with Agatha, and they share a "to hell with that family in particular" attitude.) Also, it would be a neat little parallel with Tarvek giving Violetta to Agatha. Agatha could give him a sneaky lady who can kick his ass (and will if when needed) right back. For maximum humor, Füst should take to Tarvek exactly the same way the wasp eaters did.
(this, but with JAGER BEAR)
I don't know if Gil ends up with Vole as one of his pack, because I don't know where the Foglios are going with him. But I nominate this guy from book one:
And this guy from book 14:
to follow Gil around and be reassuring to him periodically.
Higgs has sort of ended up as immediate supervision of the entire triumvirate. Whichever of them is in reach, or all three of them at once. Insert Higgs looking really deadpan tired here. This face. Forever.
Jägers get EXTREMELY excited when they learn a new baby Heterodyne is on the way, and start campaigning to be on the baby's personal guard squad immediately. Of course, being Jägers, there's a lot of biting involved. I imagine months of Jägers challenging each other, not just to fights, because they did all that already, but to increasingly ridiculous and pointless challenges that they're both making up on the spot and obsessively keeping track of. The only real rule is that if you challenge someone to something, you have to do it too (otherwise how will you know who won?) They challenge each other one on one, or everyone in sight. This leads to things like most of the Jägerhorde running a screaming, pushing, biting, brawling egg-and-spoon race down the longest street in Mechanicsburg. The townsfolk line up to watch and cheer. (They're considered a course hazard, so they get to throw things.) Whoever's currently winning (don't ask me how that points math works) when the baby is born gets assigned to the baby.
Bill and Barry both had their own Jäger squads and never knew it, because their guards weren't allowed anywhere near them. Theodora was pretty much out there with a shotgun if she heard even the hint of a Jägermonster accent. Those Jägers still resent it. They feel robbed of their (most recent) chance to be trusted favorites. They might get special-pleading rights in the next tournament-to-guard-the-new-baby, assuming their brothers aren't completely fed up with their whining about it by now.
Klaus Barry had his own guards, but Bill didn't know because the Jägers were barely even allowed in the Castle by that point, so they just didn't tell him. Master of Mechanicsburg or not, the Jägers didn't trust him not to send them away even further (and rightly so).
Nobody volunteered to guard Lucrezia. Bill didn't understand the insult in that, and the townspeople didn't tell him. But every single one of them NOTICED. Ho yez.
There are only so many Jägermonsters, so by this point everyone who's still alive has been in a personal guard squad at least once. Collectively, the Jägermonsters know all the gossip, going back centuries. They'll never tell. If pressed, they suddenly lose the ability to remember last week, much less 1528. They can't be bribed, not even with alcohol, although they encourage people to try.
Canon: Jenka was in Euphrosnia's personal guard.
Seen elsewhere on Tumblr but I forgot to reblog it: Vole was one of Saturnus' pack, which is why he tried to kill Bill and Barry. Saturnus had tried, after all, and Vole was most loyal to Saturnus in particular. (If this was your theory, let me know! Credit to you.)
TL;DR: Jägers running an egg-and-spoon race through Mechanicsburg. There. Now you have the highlight of this post.
Also: ä is alt-132 (using the keypad). NOW YOU KNOW. (hopefully I also now know, because this is like the fifth time I've tried to memorize that)
Greased Lightning, but in the Girl Genius universe, with jaeger chorus dancing in the streets of Mechanicsburg and a finale of lightning coming down on the held aloft rod of the resident Heterodyne as they channel it into their latest Mad Science! project. Which has something to do with making lightning that is liquid. Obviously. Otherwise the lightning couldn't be greased.
This is quite random, but if anyone is looking for a poem that fits surprisingly well with old Heterodynes, may I suggest Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
It includes: a sacred river, a woman wailing for her demon-lover (which just sounds like a thing that would happen in Mechanicsburg, exchange demon for monstrous, or jäger), a place both holy, enchanted, and haunted with walls and towers, a mighty fountain, ancestral voices prophesying war!, and this:
"Could I revive within me / her symphony and song / to such a deep delight 'would win me / That with music loud and long / I would build that dome in air / ... / And all who heard should see them there / And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice / And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Finally got around to repainting the trilobite pin i sculpted a year ago or something (couldn't buy one and didn't quite like the designs so i merged aspects i liked together) The paint had started chippign so now after scraping it clean, i redis it and sealed it this time.
Now i just need a jägerkin one (and/or maybe two smaller slightly fltter ones, one of each that i can put on my hat to keep the brim up!) (Like maybe some 1.5 inch long ones instead of this ithink is more like 2?)
listening to “what can you do with a general?” and “The Old Man” is making me think about the jägers from Girl Genius and like, yeah weirdly I can see it fitting in a hilarious way? Like imagine a bunch of jägers just singing those two songs.... lmao
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Barry Heterodyne & Bill Heterodyne, Bill Heterodyne & Klaus Wulfenbach, Barry Heterodyne & Klaus Wulfenbach
Characters: Klaus Wulfenbach, Barry Heterodyne, Bill Heterodyne
Additional Tags: Heterodyne Boys Generation, Girl Genius Event Week 2018, (Belated) @girlgeniusevents
Follow-up to Heterodynes 101, this fic is based on three basic convictions:
Heterodynes, no matter how friendly, always have the potential to be terrifying.
Bill and Barry’s childhood was at LEAST as fucked up as Tarvek’s, and we as a fandom need to acknowledge that more.
Subsequent to the previous two: the early days at TPU must’ve been a fricking roller coaster.
